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Can You Deliver Differentiated Cloud Services to the Enterprise?

There is a potentially lucrative business opportunity for you out there.

Some call it cloud computing; we call it IT as a service . Early adopters have already taken advantage of this trend to deliver a variety of cost-efficient, flexible, on-demand services for the enterprise. Now it’s your turn.

If you are a service provider looking to speed time to market for a differentiated cloud service that you can operate with predictable cost and service levels, we can help.

There are many important considerations when building an IT as a service offering.

From a business perspective, you want:

Ability to build differentiated services

Agility to quickly seize new market opportunities

Competitive pricing that still delivers profitable margins to you

Ability to consistently meet enterprise-class SLAs

A long-term reputation for delivering what you promise

From an infrastructure perspective, you need:

Efficiency to make your business model more competitive

Ability to host multiple clients on the same infrastructure

Always-on availability

Service-level management

Meter by use and chargeback capabilities

Complete data protection with instant recoverability

Interoperability, including native support for all protocols

How have some of the most successful cloud services providers met these requirements and realized their goals?

Many of them have turned to NetApp as their storage and data management provider of choice. NetApp enables service providers to bring differentiated offerings to market quickly while operating their cloud services with predictable costs and service levels. Chances are, you are already one of the more than 1 billion people using IT services delivered by our service provider customers.

Let’s take a look at three service providers who have built NetApp into the foundation of their IT-as-a-service offering: BT, Rackspace Hosting, and Joyent. Each has a unique approach to addressing the market need for cloud services.

BTBT , one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services, is offering BT Virtual Data Centre (VDC). This multi-tenanted service is aimed at midsized and larger businesses that are looking to move all or part of their IT resources onto a pay-for-use platform. VDC provides BT customers with a reliable, resilient, and lower-cost alternative to in-house data centers; conventional, single-tenancy outsourcing; and one-size-fits-all hosted services, and it provides BT with a valuable new revenue stream.

To be successful, VDC’s architecture has to be robust, reliable, and secure, and it has to support BT’s criteria for the separation of customer data. Not only does the storage have to be secure, it also has to work in an almost completely automated environment. BT believes that its engineers should need to go on site only to replace or upgrade physical components. And with enterprise-class customers demanding 99.95% uptime, resiliency and business continuity also had to be built in from the outset. BT chose NetApp as the storage at the foundation of its "click to buy/build" infrastructure. This infrastructure:

Requires 80% less storage

Reduced the amount of disk space by 46%

Cut the amount of network bandwidth by 95%

Launched a cost-effective service, on time, to meet its customers’ SLAs

Craig Parker, head of Global IT Services Propositions at BT Global Services, explains, "NetApp’s involvement in the development of VDC further builds on our successful track record in working together. The scalability of NetApp® hardware and its ease of use enable us to fulfill customer provisioning orders made via VDC’s self-service portal in a rapid and cost-effective manner."

Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting and NetApp Helping Customers Get Out of the Mess of IT

Now that you’ve heard from some of our customers about their cloud offerings and why they chose to build them using NetApp technologies, we would love to hear from you. To join the conversation about what IT as a service means to you, go to our Cloud Community .

Of course, if you’re looking to build and offer cloud services either internally or externally, we can help. The first step is an objective evaluation of your current infrastructure capabilities. The NetApp Enterprise Transformation Workshop provides a guide to transforming your data center and addressing today’s needs and future requirements.